Monthly Archives: May 2013

Markham Turner is a native New Zealander and has written 3 novels, to date, all published as ebooks via Moulin Publications. The books are available through a number of different distributors in several different formats. Markham writes for the fiction genre and two of his books come under the action-adventure category. He has also written one science fiction novel which will leave you in the mind of Blakes 7 or something of a similar ilk. I have read and enjoyed all three of his novels and couldn’t really differentiate which one I would put ahead of the others. I really liked all three and would happy to recommend them all to anyone looking for a book that is a little different from the norm and perhaps a little bit quirky.

To get an understanding of where this rare species of New Zealand authors gets his quirky style of writing, I decided to ask him a few questions designed to give his readers a little bit of an insight into the man himself. Following is the latest, author spotlight, interview of Markham Turner:

Interviewing an Author from New Zealand

Q) You have written three books now and have more in the pipeline. What is it that gives you the motivation to continue writing?

A) I’ve always wanted to write; having started, I now feel uncomfortable if I can’t type at least few paragraphs a day; some weird sort of psychiatric compulsion I suppose?

One of the useful aspects of being registered as a KDP publisher is that every now and then you get sent the KDP newsletter and are invited to read some very useful articles. This week was no exception and one of the topics covered was the extremely important ‘how to write an effective book description’.

Why it is so important, actually critical, to write a good book description is because the description should be more accurately named ‘my best chance to sell my book’. It is your primary advert and the main opportunity you will get to hook a potential reader and customer. It can mean the difference between your book languishing inconspicuously among the crowded shelves or really standing out as a book that a buyer might want to read, put on their wish list or even better in their shopping basket.

It is for this reason that many authors might struggle to write a good description. They often don’t regard it as an advert, but as an extension to their writing prowess. The two need to be divorced, what is written in the book is one thing and what is written to sell the book is another.

As most marketers will know, a good advert is one that grabs the attention in a simple concise move that leaves the observer wanting more. And of course, with books, the way to find out more is to open the cover and read the book; step 1 on the route to a sale.

What are the elements that contribute to a good book description?

Keep it simple, don’t try and tell the whole story just keep to the main plot and don’t be tempted to get into the ‘if and then’ scenarios. Concentrate on the key focus of the book and try to make sure the description makes an impact.

Less is more, bearing in mind that the objective is to carry your potential client swiftly to the ‘cover opening point’ (or ‘Look Inside’ on Amazon). Give them too much to read and too much of the story and you may lose them before they decide to open the cover. Keeping the description short and punchy is more likely to leave them wanting more.

Tell the your viewer about the story as though you were sitting in a bar having a chat to a friend and they want to know how much you enjoyed the story. Remembering that you are describing it in the third person and you are doing it right now.

Provide a smattering of power words that are compelling and highlight the depth of emotions felt, the danger present or the potential rewards.

Read the descriptions of the best sellers in your genre and see what you can adopt and modify for your own book, especially those parts that act as the hook. If you see a few words that make you think ‘wow’ I want to find out more about this, they are the hooks, the decision maker words that will take the reader to that next step.

To visit the full article on how to write an effective book description go to the CreatSpace page.

What about the search engines?

Something that many authors, or publishers for that matter, will fail to consider are the search engines. Amazon for example is a powerful player on the Internet and as a consequence pages they publish often get returned by search engines for relevant inquiries. This is especially true of reference books that discuss serious topics. But it can also be true of non-reference books and novels.

Clearly Fifty Shades of Grey is a bit of an obvious example to use. But you can see that just typing ‘shade of grey’ gave a second place for Amazon in the search results even before I had selected an option to go with.

But believe it or not, the same can be true of other less well known examples. And what you should also note is that the highlighted Shades of Grey in the snippet below the title will either have come from the book title or the book description. In this example it was the title, but it could just have easily been the description.

Google (or any other search engine used) decide exactly what goes in the snippet from the relevant text available and will clearly try and match the search with the result they list. This is to show that the result returned is truly related to the search being made.

To get to the point then, if you include some words in your description that are searched on and are relevant to your book topic or genre then combine that with the power of sites like Amazon. There is a chance that it could be your book that is sitting at number 2 or 3 in the search results. You can find out a little more about keywords and how they work via this link.

This doesn’t just work for Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, Sony and even sites like Smashwords carry a lot of clout with search engines, so if you are publishing a book and writing a description, this is perhaps one more aspect you might want to consider. Again don’t go over the top, identify one or two highly relevant keywords for your book that are frequently searched for and include them in your description. That won’t do any harm at all, as long as you don’t compromise the natural flow of the words and ensure the description still reads well. It is a human audience you need to satisfy, once they view the page, after all.

I am not going to claim to know all the answers, but I might know a man that does. I have been reading Mark Coker’s (Smashwords) sales analysis of the books published on his site, and it makes very interesting reading. Of course there are no hard and fast ‘do this and it will sell’ options, but there are some general trends that can be used as guidelines to help you improve your chances of making a sale. Remembering of course that there will be exceptions to every rule and common sense needs to reign with respect to each individual decision you make about your book, what to put in it and how to market it.

So what are the first and most important considerations Mark points out:

Most books don’t sell well i.e. very few sales initially and then taper off to virtually nothing

Books that sell, sell really well i.e. lots of sales initially and then sales grow exponentially

That is a bit of a wake up call really and could be interpreted in a number of ways. For what it’s worth, my opinion is that once a book is selling the distributors promote it more and generate more sales as a result. Look at Amazon as an example and the way they operate. How many times do you see the statement ‘people that bought this also bought this’ when you view an Amazon product, books or otherwise. Clearly if you are not selling that is less likely to happen.

Scenario number 2, Amazon give a product a ‘best seller’ rank, based on sales of course, and the results returned first on searches are the ones with the better ‘best seller’ rankings. In fact even when you search for a product based on ‘most relevant’ criteria, higher ranking products will appear above exact match descriptions. You could ask, how does that work? But it is clear Amazon like to promote best selling products because they are more likely to sell than closer fit low selling products, I think this is especially true of books, Kindle or otherwise.

eMail campaigns, Amazon send a lot of recommendations to their customers via email, based primarily on the things you say you like, put in a wish list or have a look at when you are on their site (yes they do track your very move). Of course they will often remind you of what you said you liked, but they will also offer alternatives of a similar genre or type and guess what, these will again be best sellers.

I could bang on about this forever, but I am sure you are getting the point, popular or best selling products get promoted consistently and frequently by the distributors while poor sellers get left to languish in obscurity. So it seems to me when you first introduce your new product/book on Amazon or any of the other major distributors, you need to be sure you have your ducks in a row and your marketing campaign ready to roll.

Does that mean if you have had your book published for a while then it is already too late? I think the answer to that is ‘no’ it’s never too late but if I am honest it will, I think, be more difficult to get that spark. What I am sure about is that if the book does suddenly start to sell, it will then be treated like any other best seller and it will start to be promoted. The reason I think it will be more difficult, is that I believe that there is an initial period after publication where the book is given the benefit of the doubt and is promoted in a similar fashion to products that are selling. A testing of the water period if you like, and that is a statement based on my experience of publishing books.

What are the characteristics of Books that Sell

This is the $64 question and one that is very hard to pin an answer on, but this is what Mr Coker has discovered:

Longer books sell better than shorter books, that is books with an average 115,000 words sold best

Shorter book titles are slightly better than longer book titles the best average number of words for a title was 4.2

$3.00 to $3.99 seems to be the price that brings the highest reward on average i.e. books sell well at that price and in sufficient quantities to return a better yield than books at any other price

$1.00 to $1.99 seems to be the price that provides the least reward on average

But before you get too excited, Mark goes on to temper these findings by pointing out that each book is unique (or should be) and that these findings are based on averages that may or may not work for your particular book. In fact the best way to find out is to experiment and see what works for you. So what I would add to his conclusions is that these figures can be used as a starting point, something to aim for in terms of content, title length and price. But as with all things subjective you probably need to go with gut feel and if you think your book is finished at 100,000 words then stop likewise if you think you have more to say, then say it. It is your book after all and the same applies to the title and the price, a little tweaking along the lines of something you think is more fitting probably won’t do any harm and you can always adjust a little later if things don’t quite seem to be working.

If you want to see the full report and the other things Mark points out then you can find the full article here Smashwords Survey, I found it very interesting and read every word, so you probably will as well.

What Can You Do to Try and Get Those Elusive Initial Sales?

There are a few things every author can do to try and promote their book after initial publication, simple things that actually don’t take a lot of effort and a few that do take time and effort:

Ask for the help of family and friends, give them a free copy of your book and ask them to do an honest review

If family and friends like your book ask them to indicate that by liking it, rating it or giving it a thumbs up on the distributor sites

Use tools like wish lists and listmania on Amazon and other sites, where they are availabe, friends & family can do the same

Tell people about the book through social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn

Set up your own website/blog to promote or even sell your book

And finally try and get your local paper, or even better a national paper, to feature you, your book or both

Getting sales often leads to getting more sales and of course when you publish your next book you can have an existing fan base sitting waiting for it to arrive so they can purchase immediately. If you don’t believe me take a look at the best seller listing on Amazon and make a note of how many are actually one in a series by the same author and very often not the first book they published.